My first tech job was working for a sound card manufacturer, and we bundled several… you’d call them codecs now, but we didn’t use that term back then. Little shim programs that let our sound cards play back different audio formats for various educational applications. One of them was for a weird IBM audio format used by an encyclopedia application, and we only had one sound file in that format to test with – that being the closing lines of MacArthur’s famous retirement speech. As a result, I heard it several times a day.

It’s been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been working on a project for the last couple of weeks that has had me revisiting a lot of my bookmarks folder, and I have found that many sites and blogs that I used to enjoy have closed up shop or simply stopped posting. At some point, I’ll probably run out of things to say on here and follow suit.

But, speaking about that project.

I’ve mentioned that I work in a technical field, and that one of the side effects of this is that I accumulate a lot of computer hardware, which allows me to have specific computers that fill specialized roles. The biggest negative to that is that I had a ton of documents, photos, other personal files all spread across, well, at least seven different computers.

It’s been the cause of a quite a bit of frustration, because I have been on a bit of an uncluttering kick for the last few years and every time I get rid of some clutter, more appears to take its place. It’s bad enough that it happens in the physical realm, but I have been losing things digitally as well.

So, my project has been to gather all of the data on to one well backed-up laptop and to consolidate the functions of several of those single-purpose machines I talked about. It’s been going well enough, with the exception of dealing with a couple of decades of browser bookmarks. All of the virtual machines now live on our media server instead of on a dedicated VM host, the two gaming PCs we have are now basically consoles with all non-gaming applications removed, etc. I have a very large stack of hardware that I am going to stick in the garage with post-its on each computer, and a year from now anything with a post-it on there is going to electronics recycling.

Some of it is old enough that I may skip the post-it step.

I’ve also stopped buying any PC games that actually require a “gaming PC”. Low-spec stuff that can run on the Iris Pro graphics in my consolidated laptop, maybe – but high spec stuff I’m sticking to console on.

One weird side effect of this is that my office is much colder now. I didn’t realize just how much waste heat the various computers were pumping out and I am needing to actually run our central heating more often now. It’s going to be interesting to see whether that raises our electric bills or whether they will drop now that I’m not running a bunch of essentially very inefficient space heaters.

Anyway, I’m still alive and that’s what I’ve been up to. I have some other uncluttering stuff I’ve been doing, and I’ll probably farm that for a post or two in the near future as well.